Two years ago I wrote an article for NWCitizen entitled "Panem et Circenses - Why I Did Not Watch The Super Bowl"   For much the same reason, I will not watch the "presidential debates", which are neither debates nor presidential but very much a circus.  Run by a faux, non-partisan (as long as you are either a Democrat or a Republican) organization called the Commission on Presidential Debates, that makes risible claims to be educating the public, the spectacle does little more than bring money to their coffers and to those of broadcasters while offering talking dogs for your entertainment.  No matter what question is asked, the candidate will respond (woof. arf!) with some canned, pre-approved and non-sensical statement from which nothing can be learned except that the candidate has given up any shred of being a person who has any sense at all of what is happening in the world.  Worse yet, they are asking you, the viewer, to join with them in the phantasm. 

In a recent article posted on Truthdiig.com Bill Moyers and Michael Winship called for cancelling the debates saying, "if the present format and moderators remain as they are, threaten an effect on democracy more like Leopold and Loeb than Lincoln and Douglas."  Surely the year's understatement.

They go on to tell us, "In 1988, the League [of Women Voters] pulled out of the Bush-Dukakis debates, declaring in a press release, “It has become clear to us that the candidates’ organizations aim to add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and answers to tough questions. The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public.”  It has been all down hill since the "Commission" has filled the vacuum with the vacuous, an achievement not unlike the discovery of the Higgs boson. 

Moyers and Winship remind us that, "...Woody Allen said back in one of his earlier, funnier films — that the whole thing is a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham. And why are we so complacent about the hijacking of our political process — that it has descended to this level where the two parties and the media giants pick as the only surrogates of the American people the minions of an oligarchic media riddled with cronyism and conflicts of interest?"

Read the entire Moyers Winship piece "There’s No Debate" here and do something pleasant on debate night like taking a walk with a friend or a lover.